There’s an interesting cycle in the learning of a language. Few sources use or mention rebar3 because they come from a time before it. We (Tristan Sloughter and myself) developed it during our time at Heroku, and even though we have both left, we still maintain it.

Books like Learn You Some Erlang not only pre-date rebar3, they initially were written in part or entirely before any build system whatsoever (aside from custom makefiles) even existed.

That being said, I’m glad the current ecosystem is proving welcoming and motivating for developers :) Keep on trucking Damien.

Some of the stdlib seems to really show some cruft. Things like the crazy amount of options on gen_tcp, including things that imo should definitely not be there like protocol specific options.

The ability to just ignore errors in many places and let it crash really makes the code much shorter and clearer compared to something like Go.

The binary pattern matching is amazing and I suddenly wish all languages had this feature. It dramatically shrinks protocol parsing code (when combined with the above point) for protocols like 9p, mqtt or sftp which are things I have implemented recently.

Overall I really want to keep learning more to the point I would feel comfortable using erlang in production.